 Aloha, welcome to Think Tech Hawaiian Today's show, Life and the Law. And I have two guests, two young lawyers, Justine Herrera and Emily Briskey, who are both staff attorneys at Volunteer Legal Services Hawaii, otherwise known as VLSH. So welcome. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having us today. So Justine, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about VLSH. Well, Volunteer Legal Services, we're celebrating our 35th anniversary this year. We're a nonprofit organization that provides civil legal services to low to moderate income individuals. And how we do that is by connecting attorneys who are volunteering their time, pro bono, and we connect them with individuals who need services in particular areas. So for example, a client who needs family law help will match it with an attorney who specializes in family law. And pro bono, let's define for our audience. So pro bono is essentially just giving, volunteering their time to give free legal services. So whether that may be just legal advice and counseling and providing with someone with directions as to where to go for their legal issue or actually going as far as actually representing individuals. So it can be appearing in court on their behalf and actually accepting their case on a pro bono basis, which means that they're not getting paid for their fees. They're not getting paid and the client is also not paying. Correct. Right, yes. Okay, great. How long have you been Emily with VLSH? I've been with VLSH now for exactly a year. Oh, great. And Justine? I've been there for two years now. Okay. Well, I understand we're celebrating something this week. Would you tell us a little bit more about this Hawaii pro bono celebration week? Yes, and we're really excited to be a part of the national pro bono celebration week. So it's a whole national event, but in Hawaii we take this week to really give thanks to all of the volunteers that give so much to the community. So tomorrow at the Supreme Court, there's a pro bono celebration day where they are not only recognizing all the volunteers who do work at the access to justice rooms across the state and to the legal lines and all the other great providers of nonprofit services to the community. But we also get to recognize students in the community. So actually college students and high school students who have done volunteer work in the community. So we recognize them as well at pro bono celebration. So is the pro bono that they're being celebrated about is it only regarding law or is it any kind of pro bono? All kinds of pro bono. The high school students who get recognized, they are getting recognized for their work at, doing work at the Humane Society, pretty much all their volunteer activities. And so they actually are asked to write essays about what they've done in the community to help volunteer. So they get recognized for their volunteer efforts as well as lawyers getting recognized for all their pro bono work in the community. Oh, how exciting. So this is a very newsworthy event then. Yes, absolutely. Will you be there? We will both be there. Celebrating, volunteer legal services recognizing one of our dedicated volunteer attorneys, Diane Mitsuyama, who's been volunteering with us for many, many years. She's a great family law attorney and is currently the chair of the family law section this year. So she has been really instrumental in helping us get more family law attorneys involved with VLSH and really getting them in numbers out to volunteer. So the VLSH organization has a few staff attorneys, you both, and how many other staff attorneys do you have? Well, we run on a very small staff. There's a total of seven of us in office. Emily, myself, our executive director and our pro bono coordinator are all attorneys as well. We have our veterans benefits attorney. She is not licensed in Hawaii, but is a licensed attorney in California. And then we have two intake staff. And how many pro bono lawyers do you have across the state? And I assume all islands. Yes, yes. We're very fortunate to have support from the neighbor islands as well as from Oahu. Currently we have over a hundred volunteer attorneys that are signed up to volunteer. And with this new project that we're launching, we are hoping to reach out to get more volunteer attorneys who maybe haven't been able to give their time in the same capacity of actually donating their physical time in office or on the phone lines. We've developed a new pro bono model to help them hopefully be able to donate their time at home and in other different ways. Great, so that's a perfect lead in. So Emily, tell us about this exciting new project. So on Monday actually this past Monday we launched Hawaii online pro bono and we're calling it Hop. And it is an online based, it's based off of our clinic model. So our neighbor island attorneys as well as anyone else can get involved. And it is internet based. So no need to come to our office, either clients or attorneys to donate their time. So it's very, very simple in that you just log on from anywhere at any time and you can type up your question and it's the same way for attorneys. They just log in from home or their office and they can answer any question they choose. Wow, I think we have some slides. So can we show the first one? So this is our domain name. It's hawaii.freelegalanswers.org. And as long as you don't type www in front of it it will take you to the correct page. And if we wanna go to the next slide it'll show what our homepage looks like. H-O-P. The next slide, we'll move on to the next one. Yeah. It's also important to recognize that this new project Hop is also a part of the American Bar Association. So this is a whole national program that's being launched across, I believe 40 jurisdictions are part of this program. And as you can tell from the top part of the screen it says ABA Free Legal Answers. So that is the national domain name and we're at hawaii.freelegalanswers.org. Okay, so what we're looking at right now it says get free legal answers, get started, sign in. So we can get to that page by going to the website. And if you're a volunteer looking to register you'll have to go all the way up to the top of the page and where it says volunteer attorney registration and it's pretty simple to register both as a client or user and an attorney. You just follow the steps. We have our screenshots from the next couple of slides show exactly how to do that. So do the attorneys, are they screened in any way or can any attorney just? As long as you're an active or, because you can be inactive pro bono as well as long as you're an attorney in good standing in the state of Hawaii and you sign up through us I just have to make sure that you are actually in good standing and I will authorize you to use our website. Okay, so then there are two steps for an attorney. First, the attorney contacts to register as a pro bono attorney in the state. Well, you just register right on the website assuming you're active, but if you're inactive then we have to go through a process and follow the correct affidavit to make sure that you're changed to inactive pro bono. And is there a specialty of law, for instance, family law or immigration that we have to identify? We're always going to be in dire need of family law attorneys to volunteer with us because that's typically one of our most common questions of topics that come up. But any attorney is encouraged to volunteer. The nice thing about Hawaii online pro bono is that the volunteers have plenty of time to research their answers. So if you're new to pro bono for instance and maybe you do transactional law there might be questions about landlord tenant or collections that you can research and figure out how to answer those questions appropriately on your own time. So it takes the pressure off a little bit from exactly how or from an in-person face-to-face setting. Right, except that so the client then will log on and have a landlord tenant question, key in the question, be matched with an attorney. The attorney will actually get to pick the question by themselves. So the attorney themselves is doing the matching. So the question will be if the question goes live as soon as the user posts it and the attorneys can log in at any time and see the questions that have been asked. And then you can go through the queue and choose which question you want to answer. So you're actually allowed, you're able to see the opposing parties, the legal topic and the question itself before you choose to answer it. That way you're only picking questions that you feel are appropriate for yourself to answer. So are you as the project, I understand you're the project manager and developed program in Hawaii. Are you in any way helping to match or screen the questions? Absolutely. So my job in the behind the scenes is to make sure that the questions being asked are appropriately categorized and are appropriate for this site. So for instance, if someone asks a question like, I want to get divorced. That's not really a question. So that person is going to be contacted by me to set them on the right path to asking a question about divorce and specifically what kind of question do they have about getting divorced rather than just saying that? Because that's not a question one and it's not really attractive for an attorney to pick. So my job is going to be trying to flush those out and make sure that the questions are appropriate so attorneys actually want to answer them. And I have that capability to communicate back and forth with the users to make telephone. Nope, it's all online. So they'll get an email from me and I really think that takes down a big barrier of communication that we have with a lot of our Outer Island clients is communicating with them on demand by email. So a lot of times we have a hard time reaching our clients by phone and have to leave voicemails and play phone tag so that email component, they can get to it when they get it. So and they're still getting that same information but then once their questions are updated and asked appropriately, they'll be able to hopefully an attorney would be more likely to answer it then. I see, and so these questions then, if they're very complicated, how does that process? This is mostly going to be a starting point. So if it's a complicated question that might be beyond the scope of what this website is designed for, this website is designed to really be a starting point. It's not supposed to replace in-person, face-to-face legal advice. There's nothing can replace that. So this is more designed for people, especially in rural areas, that it might take two hours to drive to the Access to Justice room and they really have no idea where to start. So instead of driving two hours and being frustrated because they weren't ready or they didn't know what to ask or they didn't have the forms filled out, they can start by going to Hop and asking their question from their home or a local library and a volunteer can come in and say, here's the form, this is how to get started, this is what you need to do to start the divorce process. So then by the time they are making that appointment at the Access to Justice room, they're going to get their forms reviewed or by the time they're having an appointment on the phone with a volunteer legal services attorney, their phone calls, their appointments a lot more worthwhile. Right, efficient. So once the volunteer lawyer is matched with the client online, can the client continue to work with that volunteer lawyer once it gets more complex? And that's where we're hoping to, we're still working that out, but we're hoping to be able to just refer them over to either legal aid or volunteer legal services to further that relationship. But as far as like the way it's set up right now is you can communicate back and forth between the user as well as the attorney. So if you need further information to answer the question, you just have to ask the user to follow or you just follow up with the user and you can also ask them to upload documents or pictures if you need information regarding their court documents or something like that. And then as an attorney, you have complete control over when that relationship ends. So whether that's going back in four, three or four times or it's gotten to a point where they need to be referred, then I'm hoping that I'll be able to catch that on my end or that the attorney says, hey, this needs to be referred, this person needs full representation and then we'll go from there at BLSH. Great, well, this is really exciting program. We're gonna go for a short break and we'll be right back to talk a little bit more about the access to justice rooms and a little bit more about hop. We'll be right back. This is Carol Mon-Lee, Life in the Law with my guest, Justine and Emily from VLSH. We'll be right back, thank you. Hello, I'm Marianne Sasaki, welcome to Think Tech Hawaii where some of the most interesting conversations in Honolulu go on. I have a show on Wednesdays from one to two called Life in the Law where we discuss legal issues, politics, governmental topics and a whole host of issues. I hope you'll join me. Aloha, my name is John Wahee and I used to be a part of all the things that you might be angry at. I served in government here and may have made decisions that affects you. So I wanna invite you in. I wanna invite you in to talk story with me and some very special guests every other Monday here at Talk Story with John Wahee. Come on in, join us, express your opinion, learn more about your state and then do something about it. Aloha. Welcome back, this is Carol Mon-Lee, Life in the Law with my guest, Justine and Emily from VLSH and we're talking about an exciting new program called Hop. So just before we went to break, Emily, you mentioned the access to justice rooms on the neighbor islands and in Oahu and I'm thinking our viewers may not know what that is. So Justine, tell us about those. So the access to justice rooms or we call it the ATJ rooms are a program that was actually brought out by the access to justice commission and it was originally founded as an idea from the Equal Justice Conference which is the national conference. And what they are, they're self-help rooms. They're rooms where we have volunteer attorneys and it's run through the Hawaii State Bar Association in connection with the Legal Aid Society of Hawaii and they have volunteer attorneys in law firms that adopt certain months or weeks out of the year to actually donate their time and their associates to these rooms or in certain outer islands desks to actually provide available services for people in the courthouse. So it's really meant for people who are coming straight out of a court hearing maybe didn't quite understand what they needed to do next can go talk to a volunteer attorney in person and get advice or information about where to go. They're designed mainly at the courthouse for that purpose of providing civil legal services directly in the court building. There are no income qualifications because it's a court sanctioned program. So it's pretty much anyone at the courthouse who's lost may not know what they're doing. You see some papers, what is this about? What do I have to do next? But it's only civil. It's only civil, yes. So right now they're located at the district court here in Honolulu as well as there's one in Family Court in Kapolei and there's one in each outer island from Kauai all the way to Hilo, one also in Kona. So there's two on the big island and they act as a place for people to just get assistance as to what to do next, where to go and hopefully while they're still fresh in their mind as to what the judge just told them that they need to do. So it's a way to kind of help bridge that step and all of these different access to justice initiatives that have come out of the Access Justice Commission in Hawaii have that goal of really providing civil legal services to individuals who really just don't know the legal process and don't speak the legal language. And so there's various different projects and by adding in hop into this mix we're just providing a different platform. And it's really meant to be for those outer island families and residents who don't have as easy access to getting down into Honolulu. If you're coming from a far side of the big island driving up to Hilo or Kono could be two to three hours away. And also it's important to note that the outer islands only provide legal information at their self-help centers. They don't actually provide legal advice. And so they are restricted a little bit in their ability as to where they can go to get information. And unfortunately there isn't just a ready attorney available to answer their questions at all hours. Self-help centers throughout the state are only limited to a couple hours a day and sometimes just a couple days a week. So depending on what island you're on can really depend on what level of service and what kind of services you can get from the community. So we're really hoping to just keep expanding and to build on that to really give the community more options and more leeway into how they can get their civil legal questions answered. Right, but you mentioned information versus advice. So is hop giving information only or advice? Both. So we're definitely recruiting volunteer attorneys who are willing and able to provide legal advice and counsel. We don't want to just limit that information. We do have, if that's all the person is asking about that's great, but we really are looking to provide at least a starting point for legal advice. Right, Emily tell us a little bit more about the background of hop. I understand we had already talked about the American Bar Association. Yeah, so hop actually started, well, Hawaii online pro bono actually started in Tennessee. So of all places, it was started by the Tennessee Alliance for Legal Services or TALS along with Baker Donaldson in the state of Tennessee. That's a law firm there. And they've been working on this for quite a while now. They've been active for a couple of years, for a year maybe two. And they've had great success with it in Tennessee and decided that they wanted to, or other states decided that, hey, this is a great idea, let's jump in. And- You mean the model? Yeah, well, Baker Donaldson actually licensed the software to all the other states. So the ABA has gotten on board and they did all the web development and they're providing all the fancy website that you see. That's not us. We're just providing the admin support behind the scenes and making sure that everything is marketed to Hawaii in an appropriate way and making sure that our volunteers are happy and as well as our users. But it is part of a national project, as Justine said. There's 40 jurisdictions that have adopted it and we were part of the second wave when we launched it this past Monday. So yeah, we're really looking forward to having a lot of users get their questions answered. I don't quote me on the numbers from Tennessee. I can provide them for you if you want to include them. But do you have a projection for Hawaii what you look forward to seeing the response to be? I don't know, what do you think, Justine? Well, we know that it's so hard for our rural services, our rural islands to get services. So we're really hoping that this will bring an increase in terms of outer island participants. So we don't know exactly what that number is gonna be but our goal is really just to do outreach on the neighbor islands with the help of the state libraries to really reach out to those rural areas that their only connection to an attorney may be picking up the phone and calling and that may not meet their needs. And so we don't know specifically what that number is but we hope that we can reach out to those rural communities and provide them services that they desperately need. So how is the state library involved? We mentioned the access to justice rooms and tell us about the state library. So the state libraries play a huge role mainly because those rural communities may not have internet or cell phone service and so the closest place for them to get on a computer is the state library. And so I know it's foreign to most people who may be watching this who have internet regularly available but a lot of the islands are running on coconut wireless and so they don't have access like most of us here on Oahu on your cell phone to have constant internet access. And so with the help of the state libraries, not only are we gonna get to do outreach with them at their computers having display boards and signs about where they can go to log online to get information but hopefully by working with the librarians they can also filter questions that they may be getting as staff of the library and direct them to our website as an actual place where they can go and get answers to those questions. Great. You know, I think let's go through the rest of the slides. You know, some of them we may have already covered but some of them had some interesting information. So yeah, so this is actually showing you what it looks like to register as a client user and we're just showing you exactly, this is targeted for low to moderate income individuals. So you do need to be income qualified to use the site for a family of four that means you'll be making about $70,000 a year or about $5,800 a month. And you are also required to provide your liquid assets as you are also asset qualified. But there is no way for us to go check this information. So this is a faith-based questionnaire that we're having people fill out. Okay, thank you. Next. And so this is showing you what it actually looks like once you've registered as a user. So if you wanna ask a new question all you have to do is click ask a new question. And the ABA tech team created a very, very user friendly website intentionally making it as simple as possible for our users to actually use the website because we don't need to make any further technology barriers in order for them to get legal assistance. And I think the next slide, it'll show you actually what it looks like to ask a question. So here it'll show you the different legal topics that we're currently covering. And we may expand these depending on our volunteer attorney outreach. But these are the legal topics that we at BLSH cover and that we know we have volunteers willing and able to answer these types of questions. So again, it's very user friendly. It looks just like an email, an email text box. So we're just trying to keep it as simple as possible. And there's also places for them to put legal deadlines as well as the opposing party for conflict checks. And they can also upload documents and photos for the attorney to look at too. So they have to scan them? Yeah, it'll be. And then so in the case of like a landlord-tenant issue where you might be having mold, you can actually upload a picture of what that mold looks like and hopefully the... So I mean, it's helpful for the attorney to be able to look at that. Sure. Okay. And the next one, I believe it shows what the actual... Oh, so this is what an attorney will see once they're registered and logged in. So you can see that Justine and I have asked some sample questions and it'll just show you exactly what you'll see. And you can actually click into the question and read it before you pick the question, which is really helpful to our new volunteers or those who might not be familiar with Pro Bono. So they're not getting in over their heads. So you can actually just see what... Is it something I'm capable of answering or researching in time? Okay, great. So in terms of what's next for the HUB, are you gonna be reevaluating the program? Well, we just launched on Monday. So right now we've had a really, really outstanding response from the attorney community already registering, the number of attorneys that we've had registered this week alone has, I think we have 15 people who have already registered, which has been... It exceeded what we were expecting. Wonderful. And there are, of course, they don't have to be on the same island. No, and we've actually had attorneys, out of state attorneys who are active in the state of Hawaii, who have moved away for whatever reason, but still wanna give back, registered. So that's been fantastic too. Yeah, so this is a way for us to really expand our Pro Bono pool of volunteer attorneys. Something we haven't been able to do before because we've been limited to in-person or over-the-phone consultation. So if they're located in California or in a different state, they wanna continue to give back to the Hawaii community, but haven't been able to. This gives them the perfect opportunity to be able to log on any time of the day, ask a question, answer a question, and feel that they're giving back to the community. Great. It sounds like a great gift to the community. So tell me what else is VLSH working on or doing besides the HOP? Have you been involved in other projects and activities? Always, I mean, we're always looking for new initiatives to really help expand our mission of providing equal access to justice. And so HOP is just one of the starting points where we're hopping off from into other opportunities. We have a pop-up legal clinic happening on November 5th in Y&I, it's a Saturday. We have over 15 volunteer attorneys scheduled to come with us to Y&I High School cafeteria where they'll be meeting with over 50 clients who need services in a period of three hours. So our pop-up legal clinics are a way for us to actually get into the community. So we pop into the community by usually using a cafeteria or some sort of public facility where we bring in our attorneys, we bring in our documents, we schedule appointments and we provide services in the community to those who maybe live far enough out of town that driving into town can become a hassle, especially if you're limited to public transportation. So do they have to make an appointment first? Yes, so we recommend appointments for this. We still have available appointments but we always recommend that you call in advance to make sure that you can get a time to come in. Do we have a contact number or information? Our intake number, 534-528-528-7046? That's correct. So they can call our intake line in order to get a scheduled appointment. They can also walk in, but we recommend that they call in advance just to make sure that we guarantee that they can see someone if they walk in. Okay, great. That's very exciting. And how often do you do those pop-up clinics? We try to get out into the community at least three times a year, if not four. This is gonna be our third pop-up clinic of the year. So we're really excited to be ending the year in Y&I. It's such a great community. It's such a privilege to bring out attorneys. Many of them do not travel to Y&I often. So it's a great way to really get them involved in the community and provide services where some people may have gone to high school that they're coming back later to actually get advice at. Great. We're almost done, and I want you to take this opportunity to look into the camera and tell our viewers, again, a little bit more about Hop, maybe particularly to the Neighbor Island viewers about how they can access and be helped by you. Yeah, absolutely. So please sign up if you're a volunteer attorney or if you're a attorney out there licensed in Hawaii. This is a great opportunity for you to give back to the community as well as do pro bono in your PJs as our slogan. So you can do pro bono at any time. And if there's any individuals out there who may be watching this, who may be interested in finding a way to get your answer, your questions answered online, please go to hawaii.freelegalanswers.org where you can post a question or as an attorney answer a question and give back to your community. Wonderful. Emily? I think Justine covered it all. That's pretty much it. hawaii.freelegalanswers.org and sign up. And what's your phone number one last time? Our phone number is 808-528-7046. Okay, well, thank you so much, Emily. Oh, thank you so much. Thank you, Justine. It's a wonderful project. We look forward to the community being more active in being able to be assisted by Hop and VLSH. Thank you so much. We'll see you all next time. And this is Caroline Lee, Think Hawaii, Life in the Law, aloha.